Enterprises have experienced a substantial increase in the productivity of its workforce when using mobile devices. As mobile device technology has increased, enterprises have seen an influx of personal devices in the workplace. Because users often prefer to carry fewer mobile devices, they would rather use personal devices for work functions. The use of personal devices in an enterprise environment can lead to increased productivity and potentially lower technology costs.
However, the use of personal devices in an enterprise environment presents security concerns. Enterprise mobility management solutions attempt to solve security problems by providing managed applications that can access company documents while imposing appropriate restrictions. These solutions often attempt to keep enterprise data separate from personal data, allow enterprise data to be remotely deleted from the device, and enforce encryption policies for locally stored enterprise data. However, because the enterprise files are accessed on the personal user device, sensitive enterprise data and credentials are still stored on the user device, exposing the data to security flaws.
The wide range of operating systems and characteristics of personal user devices also can make it difficult to ensure compatibility of managed applications. Managed solutions and security features often must be separately developed for each major operating system. In addition, some applications are simply unavailable for certain operating systems.
For at least these reasons, a need exists for thin clients with managed profile-specific remote virtual machines.